“Another person is like a geode lined with hidden glittering.” – Catherine Newman I believe this to be true. I believe this with all my might. I’ve been privileged enough to have gazed at this glittering, in awe, inside another person. What I’m contemplating, lately, is that if I believe this about others, I might [...]
Last night I folded up a big Target box and put it in the recycling bin. The box was covered in sharpie words and crayon drawings, and has been a major focus of this house for several days. As I took it out, noticing that the air is positively swampy with spring as I did [...]
I didn’t have the best Easter I’ve ever had. On Saturday afternoon I began feeling sick, a nausea that intermittently escalated and ebbed. By 7 I was in bed with a fever, trying hard not to throw up. Sunday I woke up feeling somewhat better, though I remained vaguely carsick all day long. This made [...]
For so many years I tried to outrun my sadness and my sensitivity, but no matter how fast I went it trailed behind me, stuttering on the pavement like the cans tied behind a bride and groom’s getaway car. No matter how hard I sprinted I could not evade it, this lingering sadness, this strange [...]
This is the absolutely most barren time of the year. I realized this recently on a walk around my neighborhood as the sun set around me at 4:30. The air has that crispness to it, a kind of fullness that is also utterly empty. The trees are stripped down to their barest architecture. The outrageous [...]
Sunday was one of those rare days I’ve come to treasure almost above all others: a day with absolutely no plans. We puttered as a family, each of us doing his or her own thing, coming together in various combinations at different moments. Grace and I went to the grocery store and to drop some [...]
Life lately has felt a little like a hurricane, a chaotic maelstrom, a funnel of wind picking up tons of dust, but the occasional piece of tinsel too. I’m standing in the middle of it – though not quite in the eye, because it’s definitely not eerily calm – and trying to keep my eyes [...]
This is the darkest season; we wake in darkness and we watch the sun wane again before the clock has hit 5:00. The light in the middle of the day is often pitched, somehow, at a high, wavering note; it is full and thin at the same time, endings tangible within it. Somehow, the dark [...]
I distinctly remember, as a child, looking at the cover of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and thinking: those words are what I want. In particular I gravitated towards glory (I’ve never been very interested in power). That’s what I thought I wanted to be able to say I’d had at the end [...]
People ask me, with some regularity, how I “do it all.” Of course, I don’t. There is plenty I don’t do. And I have been thinking about that a lot lately, of the immensely different ways we each populate our hours and what they say about what we value. Every hour of our life is [...]
